Damn. That tugged right at my chest. Hearing her call herself a failure gutted me. We sat in silence for a moment, the clinking of silverware echoing in my ears. Something in me desperately needed to fix the hopelessness written all over her face.
“You want to know who my brother is?” I finally asked.
That seemed to take her by surprise because she looked up at me and tilted her head. “What? Why would I care who your brother is?”
“You might have heard of him. Nathan Shaw?”
She pursed her lips. “That sounds familiar…”
“He cofounded the dating app Pulse from his college dorm room. He’s worth like millions of dollars.” I started to fiddle with the napkin in front of me, folding it into tiny triangles over and over again.
It took a moment, but then her eyes bulged at the revelation.I was used to that reaction. “Holy shit. I’ve heard of him.That’syour brother?”
“Sure is.”
“Damn,” she breathed, assessing me in a whole new light. “That’s…interesting.”
I ignored the way she saidinteresting, as if the fact that we were somehow related was as odd as two entirely different species being connected.
“He’s always been the wildly successful one. Not saying I feel like a failure or anything but…I don’t know, I’ve definitely felt like there were times in my life when I haven’t measured up.”
That felt weird to share. I hated talking about feelings or anything deep. But seeing her crestfallen face had made me want to offer her some sort of crumb of empathy. I couldn’t sit by and make another joke while she was clearly miserable.
We both sat in the quiet for a moment before she leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest. I took a sip of water just to have something to do.
“Is he hiring?” she asked.
I nearly choked on the water sliding down my throat. I coughed a few times, a small tear forming in the corner of my eye.
She laughed at my shocked face. “Kidding,” she said. “I mean, half kidding of course. I am desperate, after all.”
“Damn. You’re cutthroat,” I said. “I just shared an intimate detail about my life, and that’s all you have to say?”
A waiter interrupted us then to drop off a bottle of wine. I thanked him, but could barely take my eyes off Frankie. Her cheeks reddened as she looked out the window before sneaking a glance back at me.
When the waiter left, she said, “Sorry. I hate talking about this—about how sad my life has become. I thought I’d becelebrating a promotion right now, not starting over.” Her shoulders slumped forward, as if she was trying to close in on herself.
Hell, I hated talking about stuff like this too. Wading into deeper conversational waters was never something I led the way in. I was chilling in the shallow end all day long. I just wanted to see her smile again. It was like a challenge I had to win.
“Then let’s talk about something else,” I said.
“Like what?”
Before answering, I poured myself a glass of wine and held up the bottle as an offering to Frankie. Her gaze dropped to her empty glass, and despite her earlier insistence she’d only have one drink, she pushed it toward me. The red wine splashed into her glass. I held up mine and, to my surprise, she clinked it without argument.
“To start, we can talk about how you really can’t spend the rest of your time in Key Ridge applying to jobs. That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard.”
“More depressing than an unemployed twenty-eight-year-old?” she challenged.
I leveled her with a look. “Are you kidding? An unemployed twenty-eight-year-old sounds exciting as hell.”
“Maybe to someone like you,” she mumbled, barely audible.
“I heard that. And I’m choosing not to take offense to your stuck-up little attitude. Just because I’m not working some corporate job does not make me worse off.”
It was easy to be underestimated. I didn’t have a fancy job or a college degree. Most of the time, it didn’t bother me. The life I’d built kept me surrounded by like-minded people. But I wasn’t completely immune to it. Plenty of dates had writtenme off the moment they learned that little detail, as if skipping college hadn’t been a deliberate choice that I made.
“Sorry.” Frankie at least had the decency to look guilty. Her life probably so heavily revolved around what someone’s job title was, or where they worked. Just as she was an enigma to me, I was likely a mystery to her.
